Xi takes ‘victory lap’ as regime cements power
Chinese President Xi Jinping has declared that Hong Kong has ‘‘risen from the ashes’’, as he ventured outside mainland China for the first time since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic to attend the 25th anniversary of the territory’s handover from British to Chinese rule.
Xi and wife Peng Liyuan stepped off a train at Hong Kong’s West Kowloon station to be greeted by young adults and children waving Chinese and Hong Kong flags and chanting ‘‘Warmly welcome’’ in Mandarin Chinese, rather than the Cantonese traditionally used in the city.
In an apparent reference to protests in recent years against Beijing’s encroachment, eventually crushed by a strict national security law, Xi said in a brief speech that after ‘‘rain and storm, Hong Kong has risen from the ashes’’.
For Xi, China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, who is expected to begin a precedentbreaking third term later this year, the proceedings are a chance to cement personal power over the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) by declaring that the nation has grown stronger and more united under his rule.
But for many in Hong Kong, the halfway point of a 50-year period where the city was guaranteed a ‘‘high degree of autonomy’’ under a mechanism known as ‘‘one country, two systems’’ is a time to mourn the erosion of freedoms and dashed hopes of a more democratic future.
‘‘After the uprising and protests of 2019 and 2020, the Beijing government wants to portray that everything is under control – the opposition and rebellious elements have been wiped out,’’ said Ho-fung Hung, a professor of political economy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
‘‘It’s a victory lap, and Xi Jinping will try to portray that he is the one who achieved this socalled ‘second return’ of Hong Kong.’’
Crushing the pro-democracy protests frayed Beijing’s relationship with the city’s youth and with many Western governments. But Chinese scholars have started to speak of the ‘‘second return’’ of Hong Kong.
Zheng Yongnian, an influential political scientist at the
Chinese University of Hong Kong, told state media that the early years of post-1997 Chinese rule were ‘‘sovereignty without the power to govern’’.
The national security law, Zheng said, was a good start but only the beginning of the ‘‘reconstruction’’ that Hong Kong’s political system must undergo as it ‘‘moves from radical democracy toward a form of democracy more suitable to Hong Kong’s culture and class and social structure’’.
Foremost on that agenda for incoming Chief Executive John Lee, the former police chief who oversaw the crackdown on the recent protests, will be to fulfil Article 23 of the Basic Law, the city’s mini-constitution, which requires it to enact laws to prohibit treason, secession, sedition and subversion. Such legislation was shelved in 2003 after mass protests.
But Xi’s ambitions go beyond policing and legal overhauls, to sweeping changes in education and society designed to build support for the CCP’s rule.
Much of Hong Kong was shut down to ensure Xi’s visit ran smoothly. Tall, water-filled barricades lined the streets near the exhibition centre where celebrations were held. Police banned drones across Hong Kong during the visit. At least 10 journalists from local and foreign media were barred from covering proceedings, according to the South China Morning Post.
The CCP has imposed its interpretations of history on the territory. Recently, Hong Kong officials revised secondary school textbooks to teach the party position that the territory was never actually a British colony, but was only ever illegally occupied.